ABSTRACT
Literature provides radically different ways of (re-)constructing musical meaning in Mahler’s music, especially in the first movement of his Symphony no. 3. Many Mahler scholars hold that signification lurks in the music and that uncovering the “meaning” of a work is tantamount to understanding the composer’s thoughts and intentions. This chapter demonstrates how questions of musical meaning can be addressed by means of exploring intertextuality and genre. A musical genre is, indeed, a channel which “conditions the communication of meaning from the musical work to the listener” as a “context for meaning production”, and even as a “generator of meaning in a musical work”. Both Wofgang Amadeus Mozart and Gustav Mahler were concerned with the perspective generated by sonorous space, and with creating musical and acoustic planes independent from each other, but all simultaneously perceptible to the listener. “The music of the march approaches”, the instruction reads at the start of the un poco crescendo section.
